Cost, Not Sacrifice

Many deals in the real world have a lot of positive surplus. Most deals I would like to make have positive surplus. I would still make a deal to get something more valuable with something less valuable, but if the margins are very thin (or approaching zero), then I wouldn't like the deal even as I make it. I can feel like it's a terrible deal because the deals I want would have a lot more surplus to them, ideally involving a less painful cost.

Well, yes, it's true, and obviously those things do not necessarily all have genuine infinite value. I think what this really means in practice is not that all non-fungible things have infinite value, but that because they are non-fungible, most judgements involving them are not as easy or straightforward as simple numerical comparisons. Preferences end up being expressed anyway, but just because practical needs force a square peg in a round hole doesn't make it fit any better. I think this in practice manifests in high rates of hesitation or regret for decisions involving such things, and the general difficulty of really squaring decisions like these We can agree in one sense that several trillion dollars in charity are a much greater good than someone not having their fingers cut off, and yet we generally wouldn't call that person "evil" for picking the latter option because we understand perfectly how to someone their own fingers might feel more valuable. If we were talking about fungible goods we'd feel very differently. Replace cutting one's fingers with e.g. demolishing their house.

I think it's a very visible example that right now is particularly often brought up. I'm not saying it's all there is to it but I think the fundamental visceral reaction to the very idea of self-mutilation is an important and often overlooked element of why some people would be put off by the concept. I actually think it's something that makes the whole thing a lot more understandable in what it comes from than the generic "well they're just bigoted and evil" stuff people come up with in extremely partisan arguments on the topics. These sort of psychological processes - the fact that we may first have a gut-level reaction, and only later rationalize it by constructing an ideological framework to justify why the things that repulses us are evil - are very well documented, and happen all over the place. Does not mean everyone who disagrees with me does so because of it (nor that everyone who agrees doesn't do it!) but it would be foolish to just pretend this never happens because it sounds a bit offensive to bring up in a debate. The entire concept of rationality is based around the awareness that yeah, we're constantly affected by cognitive biases like these, and separating the wheat from the chaff is hard work.

And by the way it's an excellent example of the reverse too. Just like people who are not dysphoric are put off by mutilation, people who are are put off by the feeling of having something grafted onto their bodies that doesn't belong. Which is sort of the flip side of it. Essentially we tend to have a mental image of our bodies and a strong aversion to that shape being altered or disturbed in some way (which makes all kinds of sense evolutionarily, really). Ironically enough, it's probably via the mechanism of empathy that someone can see someone else do something to their body that feels "wrong" and cringe/be grossed out on their behalf (if you think trans issues are controversial, consider the reactions some people can have even to things like piercings in particularly sensitive places).